The Concept of Toska in Chekhov's Short Stories

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE CONCEPT OF TOSKA IN CHEKHOV'S SHORT STORIES Jason Scott Jones A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Global Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Radislav Lapushin Kevin Reese Hana Pichova ©2017 Jason Scott Jones ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Jason Scott Jones: The Concept of Toska in Chekhov's Short Stories (Under the direction of Radislav Lapushin) This thesis examines Anton Chekhov's literary conception of toska through close reading of two short stories entitled, "Misery" (1886) and "The Student" (1894). "Misery" elucidates the complex nature of toska and its features while "The Student" maintains the characteristics of toska yet redirects it towards a specific and productive end. Both works present toska as a powerful, permanent force that cannot be dispelled, but "The Student" shows how a character's acceptance of toska leads to his realization of the "truth and beauty" of human life and a resulting optimism based on this successful redirection. This thesis as a whole serves to shed light on the concept of toska in Chekhov's literary oeuvre and attempts to supplement the existing literary criticism of this phenomenon. iii To my grandfather, thank you for the stories. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the following individuals, this work would not have come into existence so I thank them tremendously: Radislav Lapushin, Eleonora Magomedova, and Elena Maksimova. I would like to express my gratitude to the thesis committee members, Kevin Reese and Hana Pichova, for serving on the committee as well as their instruction and assistance in the past. In addition, I am extremely grateful to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for allowing me to return as a graduate student, continue my study of Russian language, and eventually present this work. Finally, my sincerest thanks go to my parents for their uncountable hours of support in a multitude of forms. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CRACKING THE WHIP: THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF TOSKA IN "MISERY" ...................................................................................................9 BEARING YOUR CROSS: A JOURNEY FROM TOSKA TO "TRUTH AND BEAUTY" IN "THE STUDENT" .....................................................26 CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................................42 REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................47 vi INTRODUCTION In Fyodor Sologub's 1907 novel entitled, "The Petty Demon" (Мелкий бес), the word toska (translated below as "melancholy") is used multiple times in varied ways within the same short, poetic passage: Oh, deathly melancholy, echoing over fields and villages, over the vast expanses of my homeland! A melancholy embodied in wild commotion, a melancholy that devours the living word with its vile flame, reducing a once-living song to demented wailing! Oh, my beloved Russian song of old, can it be that you are really dying…? (138-139) О, смертная тоска, оглашающая поля и веси, широкие родные просторы! Тоска, воплощенная в диком галдении, тоска, гнусным пламенем пожирающая живое слово, низводящая когда-то живую песню к безумному вою! О, смертная тоска! О, милая, старая русская песня, или и подлинно ты умираешь?. (135) It seems that in the passage above, toska is a complicated term that is used in a complicated way. In the narrator's view, it is a deathly force that covers the land, something that devours the "living word" (живое слово), and contributes to the destruction of a Russian song's soul. The novel, in which this passage is contained, is abundant with numerous examples of this word and additionally, toska figures prominently as a significant thematic element in it. This novel is just one representative example of the intriguing nature of toska. Given that this word contains a multiplicity of meaning, as evidenced above, how can it be defined? A quick and simple search for the word using the online translator Multitran provides a long list of nouns including: melancholy, anxiety, grief, yearning, boredom, depression, longing, ennui, sorrow, sadness, dismay, and the blues. Looking up the definition for this same word in 1 the Oxford Russian dictionary will yield the following: melancholy, anguish, pangs, depression, ennui, boredom, longing, and nostalgia. According to this definition, toska is used to express one's homesickness (тоска по родине) or one's pangs of love (тоска любви). In his Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language (Tolkovyy slovar'), Vladimir Dal' defines toska as “a constraint of the soul, a yearning of the spirit, an agonizing sadness” (стеснение духа, томление души, мучительная грусть) as well as “a soulful anxiety, unrest, fear, boredom, grief, sadness.” (душевная тревога, беспокойство, боязнь, скука, горе, печаль) According to the definition by Dal', toska is a noun but also appears in verbal form as toskovat’ (тосковать), in adjectival form as tosklivyy (тоскливый), and in participial form as toskuyushchiy (тоскующий). A man and a woman who experience toska are defined as toskovatel’(тоскователь) and toskovatel’nitsa (тосковательница), respectively. People can feel toska out of boredom, idleness, sadness, and pain. In addition, those with toska over a long period of time are called toskun (тоскун) or toskun’ya (тоскунья). The entry in the Explanatory Dictionary by Dal' is a substantially long one with many superb examples of how toska can be used in Russian speech. In his translation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov provides several entries in his commentary relating to toska. In volume two of the work, he defines toska as follows: No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom, skuka. (Nabokov, 141) 2 In a succeeding entry, Nabokov writes, "The vocabulary of ennui also includes toska (a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache)." (156) Nabokov's commentary on Eugene Onegin is an excellent source of information about toska and several more entries located within his text are devoted to explaining the word. In summary, the entries provided above from the dictionaries as well as from Dal' and Nabokov attest to the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the meaning of toska, making the translation of the word all the more difficult for the English translator. Because of this difficulty of translation, there are multiple interpretations of the word toska. Jonathan Flatley relates that toska “is a famous ‘untranslatable,’ a word that Russians feel is somehow essentially Russian, that says something about Russian-ness itself […] there is something in toska that describes the feeling not only of missing something but of being oneself the one that is missing, of feeling oneself absent, lost, missed." (94) Flatley continues: “Toska also has a sense of duration- it is felt over a period of time; it is a state of being." (94) Sheila Fitzpatrick defines toska as a yearning sadness or simply a yearning which “is an emotion with a long pedigree in Russia, going back to the ‘superfluous man’ theme of nineteenth century literature." (367) Echoing Flatley’s remark about the alienating effects of toska, she also mentions that “toska and alienation- the feeling of sadness associated with being outside a community whose members are presumed to be happy, or at least capable of happiness- are closely related." (Fitzpatrick, 369) In Sara Dickinson’s preface to the book entitled, Melancholic Identities, Toska, and Reflective Nostalgia, she understands toska as “a state of ‘anguish’ or ‘longing’ that can exist without any precise object” and correlates it to her concept of something called “reflective nostalgia” or as she puts it, “[a] longing for something elusive and ineffable to which full or direct access is impossible" (7). In her article on the Russian and English emotions of “fear” and “pity,” Valentina Apresjan provides the meaning of toska as yet again “a kind of 3 yearning for something which the experiencer knows to be unattainable." (88) However, she goes even further and says that toska “is conceptualized as some kind of persistent tiresome pain which incessantly torments the experiencer, so that he can have no spiritual peace or rest […] this pain is not sharp; rather, it is deep and incessant, not allowing one to forget about it. The feeling of toska is likened to this kind of pain on the spiritual level." (Apresjan, 88-89) Finally, in Ogarkova, Fontaine, and Prihod’ko’s case study of toska, the authors use a statistical approach in looking at the word: “Toska is a salient emotion term in the Russian language. Several studies report its high frequency in Russian corpora, 59 tokens

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